House glamping

The last few weeks have been pretty chaotic around here as we’ve tried to get our new house into live-able conditions by May 1st so we can move in. We knew the whole remodel wouldn’t be complete, but we figured that we could at least have some basics finished so that moving in would be a viable option. The most pressing items on our list were the floors and the kitchen. All of the other construction dust we could live with, but we at least needed the flooring in order to move in.

Well . . .

That’s not happening, unfortunately. We’ve hit some major roadblocks on the flooring front. First, we pulled up the existing carpet and pad to reveal major cracking in the subfloor. We knew the floor wasn’t level but we had no idea how bad it was. We had to have the floors “leveled” for about a week. It was a major expense and also a major time consumer that we hadn’t planned for.

We finished that and we still thought we’d be able to get the flooring in, but the date we had set for installation, the flooring guys came out and told us the bamboo flooring we’d chosen was not at the right humidity level for installing in our house. We had moved the bamboo into the house 3 weeks prior, but it was basically like having it outside. See, when they leveled the floors, they had to remove the sliders from the house. There are 4 in all . . . one in our bedroom, one in Jafta’s bedroom, and two in the living room. So the house gets pretty cold at night, and the bamboo, apparently, can’t handle that much fluctuate in temperature. So last week we were informed that we had to get the house sealed up, and THEN let the bamboo sit for another three weeks, and THEN it could be installed.

And the sliders don’t arrived for another two weeks. We did finally put plywood over the holes, so now it looks like this:

I would love to say that I took this flooring news in stride, but the truth is that I completely lost it last week, because it means we either have to put our furniture in storage, or move it in, and then move it again when they install the floors. I realize that this is not an actual crisis. But last week, I was not hearing logic. I was only hearing that we would basically be camping on concrete floors for about a month.

Mark bought some industrial carpet remnants to put on the concrete. My friend mentioned that it looks like “youth group room brown” and that had me laughing, because it totally does.

In other news, the kitchen is still not complete, due to missing IKEA parts and an oversight in gas line placement and my complete failure to make a decision on countertops.

The paint is done. The verdict? I did color in the bedrooms and white in the living room. I’m not loving the white yet. It feels stark and apartment-ish. But I’m trying to reserve judgement until the flooring and furniture are in the room. In a month or so. *sob*

The past few days we’ve spend moving our belongings from one house to another.

On account of the flooring fiasco, we are just piling all of the furniture for the bedrooms into a corner of the living room. Tonight, and for the foreseeable future, we’re sleeping on mattresses on the floor, on carpet remnants from Home Depot in Youth Room Brown.